"Lately, the Perl language has had less buzz surrounding it than many other languages and development environments, but Perl is still a key component on the Internet. For this guest post, we asked Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState, to weigh in on the topic."

I see two primary reasons perl will be around for a long time. First, you can do a ridiculous amount of work with a very short (single line even) script. Why spend time writing a nice, readable, reusable script/program when you can solve your problem with a quick one-off perl script?

Second, perl is kind of an anything goes language. This makes it an easy second+ language to learn and it's capable enough to solve most problems. Plus, you can use the best programming strategy for the job to save time.